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Highlights- APAP MEGA Listings: UTR, Coil, American Realness, and Off The Map

As we move into this next exciting week of too many shows to possible see during the APAP conference, Under The Radar Festival, Coil Festival, American Realness Festival, and some non-festival performances that are “Off The Map”, we’ve put together our master highlights list. Good Luck and post back and let us know what you thought of the shows.

Off the Map

ATTA BOY follows Homer, a middle-aged Pakistani-American engineer, and Matthew, a surly teenaged outcast, as they meet for secret rendezvous at a local holiday inn. This is no ordinary affair.

The play is a collage performance, and incorporates original writing with re-appropriated transcripts from contemporary journalism, youtube videos, conservative christian weblogs, torture theory and practice, and popular cultural representations of the Columbine Massacre and the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001. ATTA BOY conflates the xenophobia/homophobia in the national responses to these traumatic historical moments, and maps a creepy topography of vulnerable desire.

with Robb Martinez and Jason Zeren, Directed by Brian Bauman and Ricardo Bracho, Choreography by Heidi Carlsen, Lights by John Eckert, Set by Christo Allegra, Sound by Seth Abrames

Saturday, January 8 & 9 at 4PM
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York 10002
$15/$12 Museum Members

Rhizome presents Whispering Pines 10, a one-act opera by artist Shana Moulton in collaboration with composer Nick Hallett, and featuring vocalist Daisy Press. It features a live performance by Moulton as her alter ego Cynthia, a hypochondriac agoraphobe prone to colorful hallucinations and absurd fantasies. While Cynthia seeks health and total happiness within her virtual environment—an interactive video set that utilizes real-time multimedia techniques its creators call “live animation”—she usually settles for fad cures and new-age kitsch, creating situations in turn comic, contemplative, and surreal. The opera, directed by Elyse Singer, will play at 4:00 pm on both Saturday, January 8 and Sunday, January 9 at the New Museum theater on 235 Bowery. Tickets are $15. APAP presenters are asked to please RSVP to Travis Chamberlain at tchamberlain@newmuseum.org to reserve tickets.

Whispering Pines is the celebrated video serial created by Moulton in 2002 that has previously spawned nine episodes, along with related performances, videos, and gallery installations. Whispering Pines 10—the latest installment—is an innovative performance hybrid that incorporates elements of traditional opera into contemporary video and performance art. Its premise—a woman alone in her private environment, aided by technology—enables a flexible sensibility wherein popular and experimental forms can mingle. The original music and libretto composed by Hallett take advantage of the narrativeʼs dream logic to weave what is essentially a pop music vocabulary into an experimental idiom, enabling a virtuosic exploration of the human voice. As the protagonist does not effectively speak, the sounds of her inner psychology are sung—glossolalia and the songs in her memory, ostensibly derived from tacky pulp culture, but somehow heightened. The work is a conversation-generating update of the monodrama or “mad scene,” realized within a mediated, medicated, feminized, and quintessentially American vernacular.

AMERICAN REALNESS: A FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
JANUARY 6-10, 2011

AMERICAN REALNESS is a festival of new dance and contemporary performance made for the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) Conference; a platform for the other-ed, experimental and subversive American artist tearing at the boundaries of their form in pursuit of new research and artistic production. AMERICAN REALNESS is unleashed onto the performing arts marketplace with an agenda to reshape the identity of contemporary American dance and performance, and an eye towards global diffusion.

For 2011 AMERICAN REALNESS features an expanded program of fifteen works in twenty-two performances over five days including a New York premiere from choreographer Tarek Halaby and two special preview performances from Ann Liv Young and Trajal Harrell. In partnership with Performance Space 122’s COIL Festival, AMERICAN REALNESS includes three encore performances of Ishmael Houston-Jones’ THEM. Additional festival performances feature Wally Cardona, John Jasperse/James McGinn, Jen Rosenblit, Larissa Velez-Jackson, and 2009/2010 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award winners, Kyle Abraham, Luciana Achugar, Faye Driscoll, Miguel Gutierrez, Keith Hennessy and Neal Medlyn.

Highlights:

KEITH HENNESSY
Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world could not heal the pain, confusion, regret,
cruelty, betrayal or trauma …)

THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 7PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 6:30PM

Crotch references the images and actions of artist Joseph Beuys. On the surface the work is about art, about its histories and heroes. Deeper, a sadness grows, a queer melancholy. A song, a dance, a lecture, an image. Talking to the dead. Chaos through Play becomes Form.

SERVING is a two-course meal; an evening of performance sampling short works and works-in-progress from some of New York’s most exciting choreographers. Entrée features John Jasperse and James McGinn’s Janitors of Lunacy, a mystical ritual dance/opera of poverty, along with a sneak-peak excerpt from Kyle Abraham’s Live! The Realest MC (Thurs, Jan 6 & Sunday, Jan 9) or Faye Driscoll’s forthcoming work snake, dog, dragon (Fri, Jan 7 and Sat Jan 8). Le Plat presents Miguel Gutierrez’s HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE a contemporary aria for an unstable world.

JOHN JASPERSE/JAMES McGINN
Janitors of Lunacy
Two men and two trash cans, shrouded in darkness, mystery and ridiculousness. Janitors of Lunacy is a duet set to the music of the proto-punk chanteuse, Nico. Initially a model turned Warhol Factory Superstar, Nico was also partially deaf, thus accounting for her reputation of occasionally singing off key. The piece is part mystical ritual; part dance/opera of poverty; part homage to a golden age when art, politics, rock, and fashion first collided and when artistic subversion still held the promise of real social change; and part celebration of the power within lunacy and playfulness. Sensorial explorations of seemingly anti-sensual objects make a spectacle of the anti-spectacular, where ridiculous actions are seen as a practice leading towards mystical transformation.

KYLE ABRAHAM
Live! The Realist MC work-in-progress
Inspired by the duality of Pinocchio’s plight to be a “real boy”, Live! The Realest MC investigates gender roles in the black community and societal perspectives of the black man through hip-hop and celebrity culture. Accompanying this overlying theme of realness is the juxtaposition of live performance versus all things prerecorded, articulated through Abraham’s original hip-hop lyrics and his love for the mysteries a karaoke system can evoke.

FAYE DRISCOLL
snake dog dragon work-in-progress
snake dog dragon (working title) examines the poignant tension between beauty, power and desire. Driscoll, collaborator Jesse Zaritt and composer Brandon Wolcott will probe ‘beauty’; as it is manifested in the ineffable promise of romantic love; as a perpetual dangling carrot of attainment; as Dance, the art form; as myth, ritual, masculine/feminine blur of power; as the performance of dissolving selves. Driscoll asks, What is the power of real transformation? A snake shedding it’s skin versus the contemporary botox phenomenon. How do these actions express the same impulse?

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ
HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE
Set to music sung by renowned soprano Cecilia Bartoli, HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE unfolds from a rambling monologue addressing the artists’ ascension to success, the hypocrisies of an unstable world, artistic critiques, and dreams and desires of a more personal nature.

TRAJAL HARRELL
Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (XS) Preview Performance

SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 12PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 2:30PM“What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the Voguing dance tradition in Harlem had come down to Judson Church to perform alongside the early postmoderns?” is the proposition for Trajal Harrell’s series of dances that comes in five sizes- Extra Small (XS), Small (S), Medium (M), Larger (L), and Extra Large (XL). The (XS) is a twenty-five minute solo danced by the choreographer and made for a maximum audience of twenty-five seated on the floor of the theater stage, gallery floor, or in the corner of the room.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 10:30PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 10, 8PM
Ann Liv Young’s style of audience interaction has been compared to the US government torturing prisoners at Guantánamo bay. A well-known museum director has likened her to an artist who sets off bombs in public places. A Viennese police report describes her as conducting “forced” interviews. (For good measure, we’ll add that she gets a lot of emails telling her she’s crazy and going to hell.) These critiques suggest that when you see Young perform, she locks you in a room and throws away the key.

In her new show, Mermaid Solo, Young is a mermaid retelling her life story. Whereas mermaids are sanitized and disneyfied in modern culture, in folktales they seduce, capture and kill sailors. Their allure is inescapable. They are sexualized, but also grotesque fish creatures who are, in fact, sexless. We are disgusted, intrigued and turned on. A mermaid protecting her oceans or a woman speaking her mind becomes something dangerous. These stories don’t come out of nowhere, magic or an ability to squash free will. We make them up because we desire them.

Under the Radar (UTR) is an annual theater festival that spotlights international artists ranging from emerging talents to masters in the field. The festival is a wild mix of works by ensembles, solo artists, writers, and creators. The ultimate go al of UTR is to offer a crash course in theater that is exciting, independent, and experimental, created by some of the most dynamic artists working today. In its five-year history, UTR has presented 67 productions from over 15 different countries. Some artists who have collaborated with UTR include SITI Company, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Superamas, Abbey Theatre, Mike Daisey, Reggie Watts, Teatro De Los Andes, and many more.

Gob Squad‘s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good)Presented by Under The Radar and LaMaMa

It’s 1965, and everything is about to happen. The German/British collective Gob Squad invites you to take the hand of the King Of Pop himself, Andy Warhol, and take a trip back to where it all began. Gob Squad’s Kitchen reconstructs Warhol’s films on a journey back to the underground cinemas of New York City in 1965. In the uncertain quest to illuminate the past for a new generation, Gob Squad reflects on the nature of authenticity, our future, and the hidden depths beneath the shiny surfaces of modern life.
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Vision Disturbance is the first production in New York City Players’ new program dedicated to staging the work of playwrights early in their careers. Under the direction of Artistic Director Richard Maxwell, the award-winning New York City Players have been making theater since 1999 and have toured to over 20 countries.

The Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street
Sitting on the stage of the Newman theater the audience witnesses a woman and a man in a desperate multi-level power struggle. Silvia/Antigone/Haemon faces Vladimir/Creon in a merciless set of challenges that amplify both power games between fathers and sons and those of contemporary “New Dictators” who also try to tame the disobedient ones. Motus, one of Italy’s most adventurous theater companies, investigates Antigone with it’s take-no-prisoners theatrical style.

Twenty-four spectators are led to a secret location to witness a peculiar interrogation. Phobophilia unfolds through a complex meshing of sound, action, ritual and video projection. Using its micro-cinema of Cocteau-inspired projections shown on an elaborate, ever-shifting pop-up book, Phobophilia is a surrealist and dreamlike examination of fear, pleasure, voyeurism and the visual archive of war.

Transdisciplinary artists Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard are 2boys.tv. Since 2002, this award winning art duo has created and presented a wide repertoire of collaborative multidisciplinary cabaret works, performances, videos and installations in clubs, galleries, museums, theatres and festivals around the world.

Performance Space 122 6th Annual COIL Festival
January 5 – 15, 2011

Since COIL began in 2006, 50+ companies from NYC, the US, UK, Australia, continental Europe, Latin America and Asia have been presented as part of this mid-winter festival. This year 17 companies boasting over 100 artists and collaborators spanning theatre, dance, multi-media, psycho-sexual storytelling, and live music will take part in this year’s festival. Performance Space 122 teams up with a diverse range of partners to present the largest COIL festival to date.

Highlights:

Join “twins”, dancer Otto Ramstad and visual artist Emmett Ramstad, as they examine the human body, investigate notions of social bodies versus biological bodies, and explore the gaps between seeing, knowing and empathy. Symptom inspects the slippage between subjective and objective understandings of the human body, where a symptom acts as an indicator, trait, feature, mark or sign that is open for interpretation. Sound composed by electro-acoustic instrumentalist Andrea Parkins.

Since 1998 the BodyCartography Project’s co-directors Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad have created numerous dance, film and installation works. Their work extends from intimate solos for the street or stage, to large community dance works in train stations, dance films in national parks, to highly complex works for site or stage amidst installations, video and sound. Their work has been produced across the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, Russia and South America. Recent highlights include a commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet and the premiere of their work 1/2 Life with a physicist, composer Zeena Parkins and visual artist Emmett Ramstad at Performance Space 122, NYC, the Southern Theater and Art of This Gallery in Minneapolis. They are featured artists in the first book about site dance in the USA published by University of Florida Press titled Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces and 2010 McKnight Fellows.

Horror movies will never be as terrifying and shocking as the human psyche. They act as metaphors – scary stories that offer a release or escape from the more devastating twists and turns of an unquiet mind. Without ghosts to explain haunted houses, we are left with the painful sites of crumbling careers, failing marriages, and abused children. In Rumble Ghost, as the flimsy membrane between an American horror movie classic and the fragility of the human condition deteriorates, the darkest place in the world is shown to be right up there—in your mind.

THEM is an intensely physical interdisciplinary work that presents an unblinking look into the lives of young (gay) men and how they interact with one another. Conceived and directed by Ishmael Houston-JonesTHEM features provocative texts by Dennis Cooper and a cacophonous live electric guitar score by Chris Cochrane. Houston-Jones’ choreography, while rooted in improvisation, develops the themes of connections that never quite happen, grappling and wrestling that seem inconsequential and ineffective, and support that disappears.

Known for its radical and reckless theatricality, avant-garde New York troupe Radiohole’s newest work is a star-spangled American meta-melodrama inspired by film director Douglas Sirk’s 1950s potboilers and Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. Our heroine is an all- American “Eve” who must save her home from an evil-doer while struggling to find fulfillment in a lasting relationship with a supposedly good man who looks like a god. Radiohole’s newest synthesis of cultural flotsam is sure to be bawdy, silly, possibly transcendent, and a touch disturbed.

The New York City premiere production of Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes, directed by Travis Chamberlain, unflinchingly explores one of Tennessee Williams’ later works, hidden away for decades and only recently published 25 years after his death. Erin Markey stars as a ravenous Southern woman determined to satisfy the darkest recesses of her most deviant desires. This site-transformative event, ensconced in a suite at the Hudson, one of Manhattan’s hottest hotel destinations, delves the disturbing subjectivities that exist in the gray areas where sadomasochistic desire and domestic violence overlap. Audience capacity for this highly eccentric, hyper-intimate premiere by America’s most celebrated playwright is extremely limited. Travis Chamberlain (Director) is a director and curator based in New York City. Since 2007, he has produced and curated performances at The New Museum and from 2004-2007 served as Artistic Director at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Also in 2007, he curated and produced the world premiere of “Week 4” from Suzan Lori-Parks’ 365 Plays/365 Days at The Public Theater. A member of Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab, Chamberlain has conceived and directed original productions: Project C: Is This a Dream?(NY Fringe), Never Live Long in Cages (NY Fringe), Head VI + 2(X)ist (Danspace), plus a series of music-theater collaborations with playwright/composer Kyle Jarrow. His direction of Erin Markey’s Puppy Love: A Stripper’s Tail received an extended run at PS 122 in May 2010.

A strange and provocative theatre work that utilizes the construction of a Greek drama and the sensibility of a classic Fairy Tale to examine the ramifications of antique guilt on the modern conscience. Following a Greek king who abandons his war torn country for the safety of a cliff-side cave, the play travels one thousand years through the extended lifespan of the tormented ruler, a man who simply will not make a decision about how to handle his human responsibilities, and until he does so, cannot die. This punishment, or gift, is the verdict of an unnamed political council, who observes but remains distanced during his years of decadent, amoral, ethical elusion.

* Off-Site Presentation

Off The Map Part 2

A fierce, undead tension animates the American frontier: the struggle between the freedom of the individual and the question of who or what belongs in the club. FREEDOM CLUB is a savage comedy about the delirium and danger in American extremism, a hallucination on national themes. It time-travels from a feverish dream-play starring Shakespearean assassin John Wilkes Booth to Virginia, 2015, where a determined group of self-styled radicals are rapidly coming unglued.

FREEDOM CLUB is the result of an intense collaboration between New York experimental theater company The Riot Group, known for their potent barrage of language, and New Paradise Laboratories, who are famous for their witty and dynamic physicality. Together the two companies present a Lincoln White House full of prophetic visions, a Tea Party from beyond the grave, and a group of feckless separatists careening to their destiny.

LIFE AND TIMES – EPISODE 1 Open Rehearsal
Nature Theater of Oklahoma
Thursday, January 6, at 7pm
Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education
928 Simpson St.
Bronx, NY

This event is FREE, but please RSVP by email info@casita.us or call 718-589-2230.
NO COSTUMES, NO SET, NO MICS, SOME PROPS… but come anyway to an open rehearsal of Life and Times – Episode 1

LIFE AND TIMES is the last of a series of works made by Nature Theater of Oklahoma (No Dice, Rambo/Romeo) which engage with and reinvent traditional narrative archetypes. Starting with their first ballet, Poetics, the company has dedicated itself to making work as a group, in rehearsal, working within various “high art” forms over which they possess no professional mastery, to create their own art brut. With LIFE AND TIMES, the company will aim themselves at the life stories of great men of genius, blend that with the traditions of opera, and eventually bring you the ultimate in musical autobiography.

Directions:
Take the 2 or 5 trains to Simpson and walk a block and a half south to 928 Simpson (just past 163rd st.). Or take the 6 train to Hunts Point and walk 2 blocks to Simpson.

The Kitchen presents the world premiere of Devotion,
New dance work from Sarah Michelson for New York City Players
January 13—15 and 19—22, 2011

Photo: Rudolf Grittner.

The Kitchen will present the premiere of choreographer Sarah Michelson’s Devotion, a new dance piece created for the New York City Players, the theater company of director and playwright Richard Maxwell.

Michelson took inspiration from a story by Maxwell, creating new dance work to be performed by the

About Sarah Michelson
Sarah Michelson’s work has been presented and commissioned by BAM, PS 122, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research in NYC; The Walker Art Center, Mpls; On the Boards, Seattle; Chapter Arts, Cardiff, Wales; and has toured to Cutting Edge Festival, Frankfurt; Venice Biennale; SommerSzene, Salzburg; Tanz im August Festival, Berlin; and Zuercher Theater Spektakel, Zurich, where she received the Der Foerder prize for best work at the festival.

She has created several evening-length works and modular works; recent works include Daylight, Daylight (for Seattle) and Daylight (for Minneapolis) (2005) commissioned by The Walker for the opening of the first season in the center’s expanded building; DOGS (2006), commissioned by BAM (2006); and Dover Beach, which premiered at Chapter Arts, Cardiff, Wales (Sept 2008) and in New York at The Kitchen (June 2009). Sarah has created commissioned works for companies including Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project (2002); Lyon Opera Ballet (2005); Transitions Dance Co, Laban Center London (2006); and CanDoCo, London (2010).

Michelson has been awarded two Bessies for choreography and one for Visual Design in collaboration with Parker Lutz and Davison Scandrett; a Guggenheim Fellowship 2009; Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award 2008, and the 2006 Alpert Award in Dance; and support from Altria, Creative Capital, Jerome, NYFA, BUILD, Mid-Atlantic’s USAI, AMC Live Music for Dance, the MAP Fund, the DNA Project, NEFA, NDP, NPN, the Yellow House Fund, and Arts International.